About Us

We are always on the anvil; by trials God is shaping us for higher things.Henry Ward Beecher

So what's the story behind our name, Black Anvil?

Well, I grew up in a farm repair shop where we had a coal fired forge and anvil along with many other iron working tools. My great uncle, who was a blacksmith, lived next door to us, and as a little boy, I would watch him heat the steel horseshoes and hammer them into the proper shape on his anvil.

Some of my earliest memories of working with my father in our shop were of days spent in front of our forge turning the steel rims of a buggy wheel as I would heat the rim so it could be reset on a wooden spoked wheel.

I loved to hear the ringing of the sledge hammer hitting the anvil and see the sparks fly as the yellow-hot steel was being shaped.

To me, the anvil represents the ingenuity and hard labor of the industrious people who shaped this nation, the dreams that were hammered out in a tough new world.

The Road To Marketing

In my early teens, our family business changed from farm repair to restoring antique carriages. This allowed me to experience a wide range of trades from blacksmithing to woodworking, from painting/body work to upholstery and pinstriping. Late teens, I left the family business to work in RV production and then moved to tool and die work as an apprentice. A few years later, I did prototyping for a van conversion company. After experiencing these various fields of manufacturing, I finally decided to step out in my own venture and started a sign company in my late twenties.

Over the course of the next twenty years in the sign business, I was not only able to experience the marketing of our own business but also share in the marketing of many other local businesses. My degree in marketing was established by the degrees of success and failure that we shared with our clients in the real world of small business.

In 2012 we launched a new company, Black Anvil Media, Inc., as a platform to expand our marketing services. Our first client gave us the job of handling the marketing of a new event center and all their in-house trade shows and events.

Today, we continue to service the small business world in Northern Indiana and across the nation with marketing and image consultation with a specific focus on developing and hosting both Joomla! and WordPress websites for clients.